When Edmund Paston was at Clifford's Inn in the spring of 1445 he was firmly advised by his mother ‘to thynkk onis of the daie of yowre fadris Counseyle to lerne the lawe for he seyde manie tymis that ho so euer schuld dwelle at Paston schulde have nede to Conne defende hymselfe’. In this much-quoted remark as in other opinions her sound and sensible husband, judge William Paston, was far from being original. The advice was at least two centuries old, if not older; the popularity of law-books for their estate managers in the thirteenth century is evidence of how many landlords then took it to heart.1 A landowner's land was a permanent temptation for his neighbours; such legal knowledge in some degree was therefore vital to him or to his stewards for its defence. More violent action was restricted, if not wholly extinguished by twelfth-century legislation; but that legislation itself and later enactments provided new, more subtle and probably more certain ways of depriving an honest possessor of his property. And titles to land, complicated from the thirteenth century on by landowners’ increasing employment of the entail and the use, gave in the later Middle Ages ample scope for the dexterous at law. Lawsuits on three manors bought on dubious and complicated titles nearly doubled their cost for an over-eager Sir John Fastolf in the middle of the fifteenth century. As Agnes Paston told Edmund her son and as an anonymous versifier told other potential landowners, it was as well to beware.

In myEngland under the Tudors I took the liberty of advancing the view that Henry VII’s reputation for rapacity and extortion is probably not borne out by the facts and that his policy did not turn from just to unjust exactions. Though I knew, of course, that this opinion contradicted one held by many since Henry VII’s own time I did not imagine it to be provocative; I thought that the work of such scholars as Professors Thorne and Richardson, Miss Brodie and Mr Somerville, had shown the old notions to be quite as mistaken as I maintained. However, I have since discovered that I was too simple in that assumption; in particular, I have been challenged to say how I would dispose of the well-attested facts that Henry VII deteriorated in the second half of his reign into a grasping miser and that he showed deep remorse in his last weeks. The short answer is that I do not regard the first fact as attested at all and cannot believe that remorse in the face of death should be interpreted so trustingly. But, since the issue still appears to be in doubt, I should like to rehearse it here rather more thoroughly. I believe that this historical revision results from an important change in historical method which involves both a more critical attitude to the sources and a better understanding of that age in its own terms.

The severity of many of the fines imposed in the Court of Star Chamber in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries has impressed historians as much as it impressed the members of the Long Parliament. For example, it has been calculated that out of the 240 cases brought in Star Chamber in the years 1625–41 where the sentence is known, fines of over £500 were imposed in eighty–five instances. Hudson, in his famous contemporary treatise on the Court, contended that this severity had markedly increased in the reign of Charles; ‘fines’, he wrote, ‘are new of late imposed secundum qualitatem delicti and not fitted to the estate of the person; so that they are rather in terrorempopuli than for the true end for the which they were intended, when fine and ransom was appointed£10,000 or more, under both Elizabeth and the early Stuarts.

Part, at least, of the historian's work consists of the formulation of general notions and the subsequent refinement of these generalities. One advance is made when a notion like romanticism is conceived, another when that notion is broken down and divided, both in terms of time and region and by the clarifications of logic, and fresh categories can be stated. This paper is concerned with proposing and-distinguishing a generalization of this type, an administrative or governmental revolution in the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century. It must be granted at once that this revolution has not the standing of its industrial and agrarian cousins. It can neither match them in ‘scale’ nor present such tangible or arresting phenomena. The very words have scarcely yet entered the historian's vocabulary, except perhaps to the accompaniment of deprecatory inverted commas. And even if the fact of its occurrence be allowed, it is clearly neither the first of its race nor indisputably the foremost. Mr Elton has staked a high claim for the corresponding Tudor change,1 and it is no doubt possible to point to really critical shifts in governmental behaviour in almost every succeeding age.

An association between the prince of Wales and various opposition leaders is a recurrent feature of eighteenth-century politics. A politically active prince found little difficulty in securing a following among the politicians of the day; the glittering prospects of the ‘reversionary’ interest1 were an obvious lure, and an obvious basis for such a connexion. But this is not a complete explanation. The prince had also a considerable degree of patronage at his disposal, and could add a more immediate and concrete reality to promises for the future. A study of this patronage, its extent and its disposal, and more particularly the way in which it was exercised by Frederick, ‘Poor Fred’, throws much light on the connexion between the prince and his political friends, and contributes to an understanding of the place of Leicester House in the politics of the early eighteenth century.